Lying on his face, he squinted his eye along the match to a distant tree.

Rising, he observed the tree that he might make no mistake, and returning to the face of the rock strode twenty of his best paces in the direction of the tree.

Again he was disappointed.

There was no hackmatack tree at the end of his line.
"Maybe he was a big man that does the pacin' and takes longer paces," he said to himself.

"I'll go a bit farther." He looked directly ahead, but saw no hackmatack within a reasonable extension of his twenty paces to account for the longer strides the original pacer may have taken.